Taking tea at the House of Lords – Indian tea and digestive biscuits – with the 3rd Earl Attlee, I look across the table at a remarkable incarnation. Stouter than his wiry grandfather, as follically challenged on the crown of his head, sporting a trim military moustache, given to smiling definitively at the end of a sentence, John Attlee has not only the appearance but also the mannerisms of his grandfather. I expect him to pull out a well-chewed pipe and fill it with Golden Bar tobacco at any moment.
Unlike Clement, he was not a career politician, but, like his grandfather, had many years outside politics before he entered the House of Lords on the premature death of his father, Clement’s only son, in 1991. ‘It was vital experience,’ he recalls. ‘One thing led to another and each step prepared me for the next. Too many politicians and civil servants have never set foot outside the safety of the system, never had to run their own business.’ I smile, for by the time Clement Attlee stood for Parliament in 1922 he too had a wealth of different experiences. And every step that he took from then until 1945 seemed planned to prepare him for the next. There was an inevitability about his path to 10 Downing Street.
‘How would he have fitted into today’s House of Lords?’ I ask. ‘Like a glove,’ my host replies. And how about today’s Labour Party? That’s a different matter. Clement, whose later years were devoted to world government and a quest for world peace, might not have treated Iraq in quite the way that Tony Blair did. ‘Harold Wilson kept us out of Vietnam,’ says Lord Attlee. ‘Why did we go to war in Iraq? Clement and Blair would not have seen eye to eye on that war.’
John Attlee answers questions in the same way, albeit more loquaciously, as the famously taciturn Clement. He considers his answer, fits it into historical context and gives a succinct reply. I asked what memories he had of his grandfather, thinking that perhaps he deliberately imitated his manner. ‘Very few,’ he replied. ‘We were living in Belgium when I was a boy. I would be picked up at Heathrow by Laker1 and taken to lunch in the Temple. Then Laker would drive me to Victoria for the train to prep school.’ Born in 1956, the present Earl Attlee knew only the last years of Clem’s life.
For an hour and a half we talk about John’s life in politics, how he spent a while as a crossbencher before joining the Conservative Party, how he might easily have followed his grandfather into Labour’s ranks if he had been asked. (‘Tony Blair has enormous charm and I’m sure he would have persuaded me if he’d wanted to.’) How he rose to be a government whip in the Lords and what the job entailed. Again, there was a directness in the telling of the story that was reminiscent of his grandfather.
At one point the images fused and I asked him why the government had not pressed its plans for reform of the House of Lords, how they had missed that opportunity. A pardonable confusion followed and I had to explain that I meant the 1949 proposals. For a moment I must have believed that I was talking to the 1st Earl.
The Houses of Parliament are majestic and it is easy to imagine oneself in another century. This augments my sense of being transported back to the thrilling days of 1945, when the first majority Labour government came to power, of being a witness to the remarkable years of the Clement Attlee administration. A devoted parliamentarian, he spent thirty-three years in the House of Commons, twenty of them as leader of the Labour Party. When he stepped down in 1955 and was awarded an earldom he became a regular attender at the House of Lords, dutifully taking the train and Underground each day to St James’s Park. As much as any Prime Minister, Clement Attlee had an undying faith in Britain’s parliamentary system.
British peers tend to be men and women of a certain age and I imagine that I am seeing not the lords of today but Christopher Addison, Pethick-Lawrence, ‘Wedgie’ Stansgate, Jowitt, the peers of the 1945–51 Labour government. That my host is a Conservative blurs the image not at all. For Clement Attlee, socialist to his fingertips, was far from being a radical. At times he must have envied Ernie Bevin, Herbert Morrison and Aneurin Bevan their humble origins. No less must he have envied their more charismatic styles. Bevin, a larger-than-life figure, doggedly English and unashamed to refer to Nuits Saint Georges as ‘Newts’, was by far the most visible of the Cabinet. Morrison, ‘the Cockney sparrow’, had a shrewd ability to appeal to the common man’s concerns, while Bevan’s cheeky brilliance appealed to a broad-based constituency. Attlee, by contrast, never quite shed his middle-class Victorian upbringing. Gladstonian Liberal principles learned in sober, secure Putney never quite vanished from his make-up. For all his reforming zeal and his pride in his government’s achievements in India and the shift from Empire to Commonwealth, Clement Attlee was a Britain-first patriot in the tradition of Joseph Chamberlain and Leo Amery.
Two long periods of Labour administrations have intervened since 1951, when Clement Attlee’s government fell from power, and those administrations were very different from their post-war predecessor. By 1964, when Harold Wilson became Prime Minister, Clement Attlee was already a man of the past, a pre-war relic in the ‘white heat of technological revolution’. And, as his grandson points out, he would have hardly have been at ease with the micromanaging central control of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. He might very easily have taken the same path as Roy Jenkins, Shirley Williams and David Owen in 1981. Shadows of three more former Labour Party peers flit across the neo-Gothic fabric of the House of Lords.
Two hours have slipped by while I juggled past and present. As I step out into a dark November evening, I imagine the fog swirling about Parliament Square and a news vendor calling out, ‘India partitioned. Read all about it.’
John’s grandfather Clement Attlee is the man most applauded (or blamed) for the partitioning of India, Britain’s ‘Jewel in the Crown’. As Prime Minister of the first majority Labour government from 1945 to 1950, the slight, angular figure (‘Little Clem’ or ‘the little man’, as Ernest Bevin fondly referred to him) led a government that transformed Britain after the Second World War. The achievements of that administration, of which the granting of independence to India is perhaps the most famous example, have become legendary. The landslide election of 1945 is perceived as the yardstick against which subsequent elections are judged; Clement Attlee, who became the 1st Earl Attlee in 1955, as commanding general of that remarkable victory, has become a cult figure.
Few of his colleagues would have predicted such elevation when he became deputy leader of the Labour Party after nine years as a Member of Parliament. Even when he succeeded to the leadership in 1935 it was widely assumed that he was a stop-gap leader, soon to be replaced by the better-known Herbert Morrison or Stafford Cripps. Indeed, even as he prepared to ‘kiss hands’ with the King after the election victory of 1945, several of his colleagues were conspiring to replace him with Morrison as leader and, therefore, as Prime Minister. His rise was attributed to good fortune rather than ability. He remained something of an enigma to the electorate; as time went on, the legend grew up that he was somehow an ‘accidental’ Prime Minister, a caretaker who inexplicably remained in situ and led the Labour Party for twenty years.
Neither of the two widely different images of Clement Attlee – as an infallible socialist icon to be venerated, or as a fortunate interloper – is wholly accurate. His style of leadership was distinctive, though occasionally flawed; his rise to power was neither accidental nor surprising. He was an ambitious man with a clear mission; he differed from his predecessor Winston Churchill in that he governed not as a charismatic champion on a charger but as chairman of a Cabinet. But the suppression of individual persona indicated no lack of ambition or purpose.
On occasion, that modest man became the legatee of the unfortunate appointments he made. Even in the departure from India in 1946–47 – perhaps especially in that episode – Attlee found that the going was appallingly slow, principally because the wrong man occupied a key position. It was a pattern that repeated itself throughout his six years as Premier.
Yet by the time the Conservatives returned to office in 1951, far-reaching, radical reform had been achieved at a breathtaking pace. The legacy of Attlee’s government formalised the shape of the post-war consensus that survived until the Margaret Thatcher era nearly forty years later. For those reforms Attlee cannot take sole credit, but his ability to consume official business at stunning speed, his skill and diplomacy in keeping in harness a disparate, vocal group of able men, his relentless drive to bring projects to conclusion without compromise of principle – all these qualities combined to create a redoubtable leader. As Bevin famously commented in 1950, ‘Clem never put forward a constructive idea in his life, but no one else could have kept us all together.’2
Without doubt the elevation of Attlee to cult status contains an element of nostalgia. The triumph of politics since Attlee’s heyday brings with it a wistful contemplation of a Prime Minister motivated by the highest principles: patriotism, loyalty, decency in the internecine Labour Party, meticulous honesty in his dealings with politicians of all parties. Even his removal from office can be attributed to an altruistic motive: he insisted that an early election be held before King George VI set off on a tour of the Commonwealth, as he was adamant that the monarch’s tour should not be vitiated by concerns about the state of his government in Britain. In this light Attlee becomes less a cult figure than a symbol of political decency that may have vanished for good. As to his rise to power, it was achieved entirely on merit, aided, it is true, by the tergiversations of Ramsay MacDonald’s government, by the electorate’s dim view of the Tory Party of the 1930s, by the absence from the House of Commons of his Labour Party rivals at critical moments.
Closer scrutiny reveals a committed patriot who returned from service in the First World War and, most wisely, retained his military rank, becoming affectionately known in his East End constituency as ‘the Major’; a Member of Parliament who earned the deepest respect of his parliamentary colleagues between 1931 and 1935; a dedicated and competent Deputy Prime Minister in the coalition government during the war of 1939–45. Just as he had won the loyalty of the Parliamentary Labour Party, he earned his spurs in the wider Labour movement despite his lack of proletarian origin. By the end of the Second World War he had won the respect of the electorate, having been the voice of the government when Churchill was absent – as he frequently was.
At every critical point in his rise to power, Clement Attlee was simply the right man in the right place at the right time. Napoleon, it is true, would have approved of him, for he had that virtue that Bonaparte valued most in a general – he was lucky. It was greatly more than luck, however, that thrust power upon him. As Frank Field has astutely observed,3 his later writings after he stepped down as Labour leader illustrate most clearly the ethical values that he brought to the exercise of politics and power. He led by example and was never ashamed to do so.
His tenure of power, sandwiched between two periods when Winston Churchill occupied Downing Street, inevitably results in comparisons between the two very different men who handled the business of being Prime Minister in widely different ways. General Sir Ian Jacob remembered that to Churchill ‘what mattered most … was not so much that he was Prime Minister and Minister of Defence as that he was Minister of Defence and Prime Minister … He saw himself first as the man running the war, and second as the Prime Minister.’4 While Attlee for a brief period occupied both those offices on first attaining power, it is definitively not as a head of a government department that we think of him. In the pre-war Labour government his most visible ministerial role was as Postmaster General. When Sir Stafford Cripps plotted to unseat the Prime Minister in 1947, his proposal that Attlee should become Chancellor of the Exchequer was absurd.
It was as Prime Minister that he excelled; by skilful and patient management that he governed. Bevin was correct in his assessments of himself and his colleagues, identifying Attlee’s ability to sum up the majority view of his Cabinet with succinct accuracy, and concluding that no other of his colleagues could have done the job.
In no sense was Clement Attlee an ‘accidental’ Prime Minister. As one traces his path from Haileybury to Oxford to the Inns of Court and his first visit to the East End of London, as we fit together his family’s commitment to social service, his wartime record, his passionate view of the obligations (and the limitations) of a socialist government and his contributions to that goal, his rise becomes not accidental but inevitable.